Miscellaneous Thoughts On Dentistry And Biotechnology

Monthly Archives: July 2016

When a soldier is shot in battle, it is rarely the case that the bullet leads to a quick and immediate death. Rather, the leading cause of death on the battlefield is hemorrhage, or excessive blood loss. While methods of clotting blood flow such as tourniquets or gauze pads do exist, they often do little to help in situations where a deep wound has been inflicted in junctional areas- such as the neck, shoulder, or groin. As a result, casualties due to blood loss often occur while soldiers are being transported to a nearby medical station or hospital.

In 2013, students at John Hopkins University developed an injectable foam with hemostatic effects that could be applied to major wounds. The foam, a product of a chemical reaction between a polyol and a diisocyanate, expands exponentially once it is injected into a wound, then hardens a few seconds later to apply pressure to the walls of the cavity.

Although touted at that time as an innovative technology to quickly block blood loss on the battlefield, it was later discovered that the high blood pressure of soldiers would lead to the foam being washed right out- rendering the whole process useless in terms of preventing hemorrhage.

Now, an Oregon startup biotech company claims they have a better solution- a modified syringe containing small sponges that are injected directly into the wound. The sponges are coated with chitosan, a chemically processed form of chitin.

While chitosan has mainly been employed in biopesticides or drug transmission, scientists have recently discovered that it has hemostatic properties. The interaction of its positively charged amino side group with the negatively charged cell membrane of red blood cells leads to the accumulation of clotting factors, resulting in rapid thrombus formation.

When these sponges are directly injected into the open wound, they can expand up to 20 times their original size, applying pressure to the walls of the cavity in just 15 seconds. And because sponges naturally cling to moist surfaces, they aren’t washed right out by the flow of blood.

In ancient Egypt, carved pebbles or seashells would be anchored to the jawbones as a replacements for missing teeth. Nonetheless, the current dentistry domain has witnessed more sophistication, but the initial concept remains the same: placement of an artificial root into the jawbone to support a replacement crown. The procedure first starts with fixing a titanium root into the jawbone, and it takes about three to six months for the bone to grow firmly around it. Thereafter, a healing cap is placed on the implant’s top to assist in healing of the gum, after which it is replaced by a regular cap that connects the implant to the crown. Magdent, an Israeli company, recently revealed it had developed a miniaturized electronic abutment/cap which was capable of making the bone grow three times faster via transmission of electromagnetic fields into the implant and surrounding bone graft. Orthopedists have for a long time employed electromagnetic fields in treatment of complicated bone fractures since they facilitate growth of bone-building cells. Magdent has scaled the technology down to the dentistry domain, which could prove useful for dental implant candidates at risk cause of poor bone quality.

Scientists from Nottingham University and Harvard’s Wyss Institute recently unveiled an award winning regenerative dental project that could assist in treatment/healing of teeth. The approach utilizes curable bio-matter which issynthetic and therapeutic in nature.

Dr. Adam Celiz, fellow at the Nottingham University, noted that existing dental filling are more often to toxic and incompatible with the pulp tissues in cases of dental injury or disease. The research team therefore developed biomaterials which are placed in direct contact with pulp tissues to in turn facilitate growth/repair of the tooth’s native cell population. Dr. Kyle Vining, research fellow at Harvard’s Wyss Instute, mentioned that their approach had the enormous potential in impacting the dental domain to become more restorative.

The awards provided a networking and partnership platform to the winning group, in the form of tailored support from multinational franchises and industry partners, together with media support, entrepreneurship training, cash prize of £3,000among other incentives.

Cavities are an annoying bother to deal with and can cause pain and difficulty eating. Fillings that fall out of your tooth or allow infection to come in under them can cause even more damage. Enter the world of nanoparticles! Scientists have created a nanoparticle mixture which includes silica and zirconia which are less likely to come loose or fracture teeth than the metal alternatives.Next-generation dental materials incorporating nanotechnology aim to help teeth self-heal, rebuild enamel, and protect against bacterial infections.

Since nanodental technologies have been evolving rapidly, safety and cost will be barriers to getting them on the market. There will need to be time for clinical trials and funding for those trials. Some nanomaterials might be toxic to healthy cells, so these trials would be necessary for nanodental technologies to be proven safe and effective. Patients will also need to be told that a treatment will use materials in the nanometer size range and should be aware of any possible side effects. This new technology could also be expensive, and insurance companies may not want to foot the bill if treatments could be considered cosmetic. It will require a re-structuring of the insurance laws to get some of these products approved.
There is great reason to believe that nanodental technologies will be improving dentistry for the better in the very near future!

My name is Jaejun, and at the time of writing I’m heading into my sophomore year of high school. Here’s a little introduction to start off my blog:

My favorite mammal in 5th grade was the paramecium, for two distinct reasons:

1) I was in 5th grade and thought that the word ‘mammal’ was a generic term used to describe interesting animals (like lions, or humans).

2) In the few weeks before 5th grade started, I had received a light microscope for my 10th birthday and spent much of my time obsessively building fantasy lives for the various paramecia I observed with my new gift.

While I no longer dwell on the imaginary world of anthropomorphic single celled organisms, my love for biology is something that has still stayed with me. Over the years, I’ve found myself particularly fascinated by the great strides that the world has made in the field of biotechnology, and am constantly amazed at the new inventions that are being patented every day.

That’s why I created this website- blogging about biotech will give me the opportunity not only to track my own progress in this field, but also allow readers to gain more exposure to matter and ideas that they may not be familiar with.

In addition to biotechnology, my blog will also have a large focus on the field of dentistry, a career path that I’ve been interested in for quite a while now. As a child, a big pastime of mine (besides talking with paramecia) was Lego building. I loved using my hands and combining smaller blocks in order to create a detailed final product, and when I started on a set it would often be 5 or 6 hours before I looked up again to take a quick break. When my cousin sarcastically suggested that I should become a dentist due to my hobby working with extremely small objects, I took her advice seriously- years of Lego building had made me pretty dextrous and detail-oriented, and a career dentistry seemed like an actual possibility given my passion for biology as well. Using her suggestion as a baseline, I began researching on the career of dentistry, and found the matter extremely interesting. In the long run, I hope that I continue to pursue this interest by blogging about relevant material, in addition to experiencing some of the work that dentists perform in the field firsthand.

Taking The Genic Route isa personal blog of mine, and one that I hope to develop and refine as I go through my high school and college career- and maybe even beyond that. In the long run, I hope that this blog will serve as a consistent workplace for my biotech research, and it would be even better if project could develop into an online community that encompasses a variety of like-minded students with a strong interest in biology. For now, I hope that this brief introduction was helpful, and expect more posts to come soon.